Trace Explorer¶

The Trace Explorer in Observe enables you to investigate user requests and transactions by analyzing trace data. With powerful filtering and visualization tools, you can connect these requests to the underlying services, infrastructure, or other resources that processed them. Whether you’re troubleshooting errors, inspecting performance bottlenecks, or analyzing specific requests, the Trace Explorer helps you quickly pinpoint and resolve issues.

How to perform common workflows with trace data in Observe¶

Common user need when looking at a trace	Observe Trace Viewer feature that supports this need
Inspect the call structure of a trace	Flame chart
View a summary of where time was spent in a trace	Service legend in flame chart, as well as inferring from the flame chart itself.
See what resources were used to serve an operation in a trace, or other attributes (e.g., business metadata) associated with the operation	Fields & Attributes tab underneath flame chart.
Inspect errors in a particular span & across a trace	Scan the flame chart for spans in red, then click into those spans for more inspection.
Inspect logs associated with a span or trace	Link to a Log Explorer search with trace id or span id pre-populated. Also, Span Events tab underneath flame chart.

Common user need when searching for traces	Observe Trace Explorer feature that supports this need
Filter a trace search to a particular service	Service facet filter
Filter a trace search to a particular endpoint	Operation facet filter
Filter a trace search to errors only	Status facet filter
Filter a trace search to a particular HTTP status code	`status_code` facet filter
Filter a trace search to a particular environment	environment facet filter
Filter a trace search to service entry spans only	Span type drop-down and facet filter
Filter a trace search to a particular span attribute	Extract the attribute from the `attributes` field, then search on it using the query bar.
Filter a trace search to a particular resource attribute	Extract the attribute from the `resource_attributes` field, then search on it using the query bar.

For more information on how Observe makes trace data available, see the Span dataset schema.

Exporting Data¶

To download the data displayed in Trace Explorer, click the Export button. You may select CSV or JSON format, and a maximum size limit (one thousand, ten thousand, or one hundred thousand rows). Note that hidden fields will be included. Use the pick_col OPAL verb to reduce the width of downloaded data.

Link directly to a trace¶

You may want to include direct links to specific traces from your alert payloads. To create a URL to a trace, use the following template:

https://<tenant_id>.observeinc.com/workspace/<workspace_id>/trace-inspector?traceId=<trace id>

Traces accessed via direct link are fetched from the last 24 hours of data.

If you are using a dataset other than the Span dataset that is part of the OpenTelemetry app, you’ll need to add the dataset ID as a parameter:

https://<tenant_id>.observeinc.com/workspace/<workspace_id>/trace-inspector?spanDatasetId=<span dataset id>&traceId=<trace id>

Using custom trace & span datasets¶

Observe’s trace data features work best with the datasets provided out of the box.

If you want to use a custom span dataset, here’s what you’ll need to provide in the dataset definition (Observe automatically builds traces from spans, so you don’t need to provide a trace dataset):

Trace Explorer feature	Field(s) required in your span dataset
Use Trace Explorer at all on your dataset	`span_name`, `span_id`, `trace_id`, `parent_span_id`, `start_time`, and `end_time` fields
Filter on span type in dropdown	`span_type` field. The available values of the Type field are: ”Request Entry Point”, “Service Entry Point”, “Remote Call”
Filter on start time	`start_time` field
Duration chart	`duration` field
Error chart	`response_status` field
Service facet filter & group by Service on charts	`Service` field
Operation facet filter & group by Operation on charts	`span_name` field
Environment facet filter & group by Environment on charts	`environment` field
Version facet filter & group by Version on charts	`version` field
Error chart, response status facet filter & group by response status on charts	`response_status` field (When response_status is Error, the span is an error span)
Status code facet filter & group by Status code on charts	`status_code` field
View the flame graph for a trace	`start_time`, `end_time`, and `duration` fields
View the list of services in a given trace	`Service` field
View span events for a given span	No required fields in the span dataset; this requires a dataset named Span Event that has a foreign key column coming from the your span dataset